Nova et vetera

For about seven years, I taught undergraduate Moral Theology incorrectly. For some reason, I kept putting the emphasis on the agency of the students while cloaking the agency of God in vague theological language about grace and "his help." Then one day, a parishioner came to me to ask for prayers as she was about to begin a retreat. I assured her I would pray for her, and we even did so before she left my office. After the retreat, she sought me out to ask a moral question that arose in her conscience during her retreat: "Do I have to reverse my tubal ligation?" Now, this was not a retreat on theology of the body or any aspect of sexual ethics or marriage. It was simply a retreat on how to pray. I am concerned enough about the income and financial stability of my fellow moral theologians that I will not advocate the demise of our discipline; but certainly, I began to think, the mystical must precede the moral, as Henri de Lubac urged.² The approach I took to moral theology often elicited defensive postures on the part of students. This disposition left little room for them to receive the beauty of virtuous living as a motivating power to enter the good. Peter John Cameron, O.P., in his indispensable book on preaching, noted: "If the final concrete proposal of your preaching puts the initiative on the hearer rather than on God and grace, it is moralistic."³ [End Page 1]

One might ask what is wrong with a moral theologian being moralistic. In light of my experience with this parishioner, I reimagined my approach to moral theology and began to qualify the emphasis I placed on human agency. Certainly the academic process of teaching the moral truths of the faith has its own ends and purposes, different from the ends and purposes of a retreat, but I began to see that the encounter one has with Christ in prayer can enflame persons to live the moral truths of Catholicism. A good argument about the truth of moral behavior convinces some to enter the Church, but what sustains that movement is a living relationship with the Holy Spirit. "Due to the work of the Holy Spirit it will always be possible for subsequent generations to have the same experience of the Risen One that was lived by the apostolic community at the origin of the church."⁴ So I began to think that the teaching of theology should be structured in such a way that one might actually encounter Christ in its teaching, mostly by welcoming the truth of theology in periods of silence in the classroom. In this silence, we allow students to relate the content of truth and its effects upon them to Christ.⁵ I came to see the classroom as an extension of the Liturgy of the Word, similar to the way in which Eucharistic Adoration is an extension of the Liturgy of the Eucharist. As such, the teaching of theology encompasses what Pope Benedict XVI called a "more generous definition of human reason."⁶ Such a definition is not reducible to a pedagogical method or the demands of hegemonic scientism. Rather our "studying is always with the Lord, before the Lord, and for Him."⁷

This awakening in me overturned my data-driven classroom, which yielded to a more contemplative approach of inviting students to encounter the beauty of truth as it is communicated from within doctrine. Space was opened up, by intermittent silence, for God to initiate the integration of theological truth with the particulars of each individual student's life. Here was a chance for faith to heal reason and for reason to more deeply [End Page 2] grasp the mystery of faith.

Following upon these developments, I looked at how I was approaching my preaching within the Eucharistic Liturgy and found I was perilously close to Father Cameron's definition of moralism there as well. After a period of prayer, I developed a different approach to preaching that I presented as "contemplative homiletics."⁸ The goal of contemplative homiletics was to...